RE: On Advancement Mechanics, Experience (Hack&Slash article response)

I was just reading a post over at Hack&Slash and it got me thinking.

The post mostly dealt with the concept of experience points in RPG's and how they motivated players. Back in the old days of D&D, players were awarded XP for obtaining gold coins. 2nd edition and onward changed this to gaining XP from overcoming combat challenges. What this meant was that in "old school games," players were driven to explore the environment around them, to search for hidden treasure hordes and avoid combat as much as possible since any loot acquired from the fallen enemies palled compared to what they could find with less risk and effort in a peaceful manner. Game-play was therefore more of a problem solving experience. In the later editions, however, there is much more emphasis to simply "move on to the next encounter."

The referee always has the option to award XP ad-hoc, when they see fit. This is pointed out in most books aimed at giving advice to game masters, sending the message "if your players aren't doing what you want them to do regularly, throw experience at them until they do."

Want them to role-play more? Award role-playing experience for being in character.

Want more exploration in your game? That's right, give it to them for finding things.

Combat? You get the idea.

It's the ol' carrot and stick dilemma. If your players aren't behaving and they care even a little bit about the game they're playing, you hurl blue lightning and XP until the problem is solved. (Taking this philosophy too seriously, in my experience, can be a detriment as DMing begins to feel like house training a pet rather than playing a game with your friends, so I'd recommend above anything being open with your players about what you want and expect from the game and ask they do the same with you. That aside, it can still be interesting to think about how your game system may be subconsciously effecting the actions of your players.)

I know a lot of people that forego the first two systems in favor of the ad-hoc system. Level and experience are given when the DM either feels they've reached an acceptable point to advance, or when the story line has been advanced sufficiently. In the past, this is what I have done most.

Reading the article made me think a little more about my own group and the way we behave in relation to the experience system(s) we've used. We started off playing in fourth edition, which rewards XP for overcoming encounters, typically through combat. There are also rules for completing an encounter peacefully, for circumventing encounters, and for finishing quests. The idea of awarding quests intrigued me the most. We all thought 4e combat moved too slowly and avoided it whenever possible. As the referee, I enabled this behavior whenever I could by making any intelligent opponents capable of "seeing reason," easy to sneak past, coerce, etc and granting full XP for it. After awarding full XP for several bosses that were merely talked down, I was starting to see a problem.

After reaching certain mile stones and completing quests, I started giving XP and levels, but being a bit of a lazy DM, I stopped keeping track of XP and instead started throwing entire levels when large quests were completed. To make things simpler, our party leveled as group whether people were there or not. As a result (maybe?), combat was still avoided (since there was no insentive), but quests and stories were completed (since our group focused on storytelling this was a good thing), and attendance didn't do so well.

In my last campaign, I started giving story-based rewards in a loosely run 3.5 edition of D&D. Experience/levels were usually granted through combat. By the end of the campaign, we completed the story at only level 8. The players that latched on to the story based reward system literally became gods, while the players that were based on combat were simply level 8 characters (ironic, because during much of the campaign the too-be-gods cowered behind their meat-shield companions). Makes sense, I mean, why aim for a character level when you can talk your way to the top of the world?

After reading the Hack&Slash article and thinking about my own gaming history, it's become quite apparent that what the DM rewards, the players will follow (or should I say exploit?). What should a referee reward in his/her game? Well, that depends on what kind of game you want to run. I can say that being unclear on what actions you will reward the players for can result.